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A rewrite on Williams, initial thoughts on Stevens’ poetics, an interpretation,
a Manifesto

What I proposed to do was act out the poetics of Williams. I suffered for it, but I took Williams’ admonishment to heart: “Compose. (No ideas/ but in things) Invent! (47).” I attempted to compose and invent, wondering aloud why the parenthetical phrase between the words had become the paradigm of Williams’ poetics while the soul of Williams’ “A Sort of Song” (Compose/ Invent!) seems to have been forgotten.

What sort of song? I offered that it is the Zen-like quality of Williams’ work. In what way? In knowledge created at the point of utterance. The imagists wanted to show rather than tell. How do you show the sound of one hand clapping? Williams does this quite nicely with inference, but the sound must take place in the mind of the reader. Had Williams been a W-131 student submitting an essay on inference, his “Red Wheelbarrow” would flunk, bleeding with the words, “be more specific.”

This is why I inferred that Williams’ status as a physician smoothed his path. If we recognize only art that is duly recognized, does the canon actually fire in the mind of the reader or is it merely The Emperor’s New Clothes? To be more specific, all will nod sagely and see the images upon hearing Williams’ words. But Williams himself could do it with birds. Where does Williams accomplish this with birds?

Let’s move on to Wallace Stevens. He makes an interesting contrast to Williams, and Stevens’ brand seems to be “Reality and the Imagination” just as Williams’ credo became “No Ideas But In Things.” Poets grapple with the abstract, and Williams’ empirical tool was physical science while Stevens’ (earning his living in insurance) would have been mathematical. Mathematicians are used to disembodied reality (no one has ever seen a four- only its symbol, and groups having the qualia of “fourness”). Both (Williams and Stevens) managed to employ their empirical tools to create art.

In Stevens’ “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird,” one may observe that it has thirteen stanzas (seven with odd-numbered lines, six with even), that there are two questions in the seventh stanza. One may interpret that it is actually more than a blackbird of which Stevens is speaking. And now the final evaluation: is it art? Of course it is. Wallace Stevens wrote it. There is no riddle in the canon: art is art because it’s art. But there is a riddle in Stevens’ two questions: “Why do you imagine golden birds? Do you not see how the blackbird/ Walks around the feet/ Of the women about you?” We imagine golden birds because we have become blind to the blackbird.

Blackbirds are real. Golden birds are imaginary. “Among twenty mountains,/ The only moving thing/ Was the eye of the blackbird (20).” Among the great buildings of our ticket machine, the only thing moving is the minds of our students. We imagine golden birds. Even though they are “gorgeous nonsense,” we become incapable of yielding even to the golden birds, even when we seek permission (from the canon) and are granted it. Why? Because, as Stevens said, “…we recognize, even if we cannot realize…” (TNA 5).
“We cannot. We do not feel free.” Am I digressing from a discussion of Stevens’ poetics? Not really. I was only waiting for this moment to arrive.

I am only a junior-grade prosaic cobbler, but I join the cobblers’ chorus that the great essayist, Hal Crowther, infers in his “Cobblers Petition.” If we cannot “realize” (as Stevens says), no wonder the poets are “sulking in their tents” (as Crowther says). He is a writer with chops as good as any who makes a passionate appeal to poets: “Don’t abandon us, don’t give us up.” Whether we realize it or not, our students ask the same of us. They are struggling for their very souls in a culture that seeks to commoditize their entire lives. And if this sounds overblown and melodramatic, I’m sorry. I really am.
I will ping with my little hammer on my words and try to give them focus and clarity that corresponds to the assignment in our task-oriented world. That’s my job. I will even be so bold at times to apply my nasty little hammer to the students’ words. But I cannot beat their minds into submission.

That’s already been done, god help us. The old educators’ cliché that they go in question marks and come out periods is true, and we’re all the poorer for it. What I want to do is set them free. I understand the demand for discipline. I respect rigor. But if we hammer out an army of automatons in the name of “competition” or “success” or even “accomplishment,” we are committing cultural and ecological suicide. This world has enough damn canonicity and is starving for creativity. Yes, there has to be something “noble” (as Stevens says), something sacred. For me, poetry is one of those things.

I have seen enough hammer marks on dead poets, just as I have seen the beatings on the brains of the W-131 students that I am expected to cobble into the mold of “academic discourse.” I can teach them this as a survival skill, but I will not beat the playfulness out of them. I imagine I am capable of it, just as I am capable of using my ball peen on poets. I suppose I am capable of shooting my dog too, but I just won’t do it. I pity anyone who does.

It is the world's one crime its babes grow dull,
Its poor are ox-like, limp and leaden-eyed.
Not that they starve, but starve so dreamlessly;
Not that they sow, but that they seldom reap;
Not that they serve, but have no gods to serve;
Not that they die, but that they die like sheep.
-- Vachel Lindsay